T Puzzle: Whoa--I Know Genealogy!

by Norvin Richards

There are 8 kinds of people, whose possible relations to each other can
be diagrammed like so:

Here the = signs represent possible marriages, the double-headed arrows
are patrilines, and the single-headed arrows are matrilines. So, for
example, someone of kind 1 is supposed to marry someone of kind 2. If
the 1 is a man and the 2 is a woman, then their children are 3s; if the 1
is a woman and the 2 is a man, their children are 5s. The patrilines and
the matrilines are redundant if people marry properly; a 1 man and a 2
woman have 3 children because the patriline from 1, and also the
matriline from 2, point to 3. The patrilines are double-headed because
not only are a 1 man's children 3s, but a 3 man's children are 1s. On
the other hand, a 2 woman's children are 3s, but a 3 woman's children are
7s (and a 7 woman's children are 6s, and a 6 woman's children are 2s).

The kinship terms have three components. One tells how the types are
related to each other; that is, what combinations of marriages,
patrilines, and matrilines you'd have to move along in the diagram above
to connect the two people. From the point of view of a 1, these
components are as follows:

kpamic

lugoman

gbimukh

degbuth

mnegil

migedogh

tsivisty

ngemedlel

Another component of the kinship terms carries information about the age
relation between the two people. For a statement like "A is B's X", the
kinship term X will contain an infix -ak-, attached before the first
vowel of the word, if A is in a younger generation than B; if A is in an
older generation than B, X will show reduplication of the consonant(s)
preceding the first vowel, followed by a vowel i. If A and B are in the
same generation, there's no morpheme in this slot.

Finally, there's an indicator of the gender of the person referred to by
the kinship term. This is a floating w for men or y for women, which
attaches to the last consonant other than d, t, or l that precedes a
vowel (equivalently for these words, it attaches to the first consonant
in the second syllable, prior to the reduplication/infixation described
above).

The answers to the questions at the end of the puzzle are:

Wot is Inne's tsivyisty

Hegit is Ent's ngemwedlel

Wot is Xis' dakegbyuth

Xis is Svene's kpamwic

Neo is Ethre's lugomwan

Inne is Svene's makigyedogh

Inne is Ent's tsakivyisty

Ofur is Vife's lugomyan

The names are anagrams of numbers; if you take the letters indicated by
these numbers from the kinship term, they spell "SYLLABIC L GOES TO M".

The family tree described in the problem is below (I've put men's names
in boldface and underlined women's names; = represents marriage, again,
and the lines connect sets of siblings with their parents in hopefully
intuitive ways):